Race, to the top

Barack Obama has a reputation for calculation and diffidence — at times well deserved — but on Friday, he again demonstrated his instinctive gift for confronting the ugly, divisive, emotional issues that more squeamish politicians evade.

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch member in Florida, apparently for nothing more than wearing a hoodie and buying candy on the wrong block, would be an incident any president would want to handle gingerly, if at all.

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That would seem especially true for a half-white, half-black president who has often dealt with race, especially his own, like unexploded ordnance — ancient, buried, but still capable of inflicting great damage.

Obama has seldom directly addressed the issue of race since his famous Philadelphia speech on the topic in 2008 — and he never does unless it’s in the service of the larger point of national unity. And instead of talking about racial issues from the traditional political frame, he talks about it as a family matter to defuse the tension and, from his perspective, elevate the argument.

“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said. “All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves,” he said during a brief appearance in the sunshine to announce, of all things, his nomination of a college president to run the World Bank.

“When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids,” he said — clearly ready for a reporter’s question on the topic. “I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. And that everybody pull together.”

This was vintage Obama (and 2008 was his best year in the vineyard) invoking universal, “Father Knows Best” American values when others have been dodging the topic or inhabiting their expected roles. When he’s strayed from that script, as he did during the flap over the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., he’s been burned.

Obama “made the statement from the point of view of being a father,” said Rep. Karen Bass, (D-Calif.) a White House ally. “It was very powerful and extremely important. I thought it was right on time.”

“It’s a horrible case,” Santorum said. “It’s chilling to hear what happened, and of course the fact that law enforcement didn’t immediately go after and prosecute this case is another chilling example of horrible decisions made by people in this process.”